Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. A Meritorious Heart
     … You can’t expect someone to come down and undo your suffering for you, because your own suffering is caused by a lack of skill, and nobody else can make you skillful. They can point out how to become skillful. But the actual energy and attention, mindfulness and discernment that are needed to develop a skill: Those are things you have to bring to … 
  3. Assumptions
     … the desire to do what’s skillful. You hold onto that even if it’s not getting immediate results. That’s a skillful desire. It’s part of the path. And of course you want to do it skillfully as well. If an unskillful state comes up and you try to deny it or push it away, it’s going to come right back … 
  4. The Unity of the Path
     … This is the skillful use of judgment. The term “judging mind” has so much bad press here in America, especially in Dhamma circles, when it really shouldn’t. There’s skillful judging and unskillful judging. We’re trying to engage in skillful judging, which is focusing on actions and their results, rather than focusing on what kind of person you are. We’re focusing … 
  5. Study to Practice
     … How do you stay with the body in and of itself? How do you stay with the breath in and of itself? When greed and distress with reference to the world come up, how do you deal with them? And what’s the skillful way to be alert? To be ardent? What’s the skillful way to be mindful? After all, there are lots … 
  6. The Governing Principle
     … You’ve got to give rise to skillful qualities in the mind. And once you’ve got something skillful, you want to maintain it, to try to make sure that it doesn’t pass away. So always keep this in mind as you’re practicing, because the teachings that tell you otherwise are all over the place. When we were trying to find a … 
  7. Heedful, Ardent, & Resolute
     … It’s that desire to find what’s skillful in life along with the good results of what’s skillful: That’s what’s wise. And this is going to require effort. You notice there are things that have come up in the mind that are unskilful, so you learn to let go of them and then you do what you can to prevent … 
  8. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … So, skillful desire is wise. It’s also wise in the sense that you understand how best to use the Buddha’s teachings in line with their purpose. You can read about the teachings and you can talk about them, but if you don’t have the desire to put them into practice and actually master them as skills, you can’t be said … 
  9. How to Leave Concentration
     … It’s very rare, though, that we talk about how to leave concentration, but it’s an important skill as well. The Buddha listed it as part of mastery of concentration. If you think superficially, you might say, “Well, that’s the easiest thing to do, leave concentration”; that’s one skill you’ve got down. But actually there are skillful and unskillful ways … 
  10. Get Out of Yourself
     … As you go from moment to moment, mindfulness is there to remind you again and again to be alert, to focus on what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, and try to understand these things so that you can really develop what’s skillful, and abandon what’s unskillful effectively. It’s good work, and you’re learning the skills that are needed … 
  11. But Not Sick in Mind
     … We can also translate it as ingenuity, or as discrimination—in other words, seeing clearly what’s going on, making distinctions about what’s skillful and what’s not in the mind, and figuring out what to do about the things that are unskillful, figuring out what to do about the things that are skillful. In other words, you bring your powers of analysis … 
  12. Appreciating Merit
     … delighting in abandoning and delighting in developing, i.e., delighting in skillful activities, training the mind to do things in a skillful way: abandoning unskillful habits and developing skillful ones in their place. The delight there is important. It means that your values support you in this practice. We were talking earlier today about the practice of merit, and about how, here in the … 
  13. Watching Over Time
     … Keep watching and doing, watching and doing—and this is how skill develops. Skill, basically means being sensitive to the raw materials that you’re given in any given moment, and then being sensitive to what you’re doing, and then being sensitive to what the results are. These three things, when you put them together, give the mind a chance to develop skill … 
  14. At Home with the Breath
     … That’s how you develop skill. In our society, we have lots of people who don’t have that many physical or manual skills. As a result, we tend to miss a lot of the character traits that go along with developing a manual skill: the willingness to try, try, try again and not just try in the sense of batting your head against … 
  15. Alighting on the Dhamma
     … There are skillful events and unskillful events happening there. Once you notice they’re skillful or unskillful, then you know what to do. If something is skillful, you try to develop it. If it’s unskillful, you try to abandon it. All this comes under appropriate attention. Now, we don’t have the Buddha with us now. We can read some of the talks … 
  16. Three Virtues for the Mind
     … Similarly with a person who does skillful things, says and thinks skillful things in the present life, but then suffers: That person may have some old bad karma that’s hogging all the opportunities right now. But the good actions will eventually show their results. In any event, even when things are going poorly, it doesn’t mean that you have to suffer from … 
  17. Attachment to Precepts
     … So as the Buddha said, when you get beyond skillful habits, it’s not that you start engaging in unskillful habits. Getting beyond the skillful habits means that you’ve seen something that goes beyond them. But you still stick to them. In fact, you’re even more firm in sticking to them because you’ve seen how harmful it is to break the … 
  18. Events as Events
     … In particular, when you get to acts of attention and acts of intention, there are skillful ones and unskillful ones. Your perceptions can be skillful or unskillful. Whether they’re skillful or not has nothing to do with whether you like them or not. It has a lot to do with where they’re going to take you. When you look at them on … 
  19. Goodwill as Restraint
     … There are some difficult situations you have to learn how to accept because you can’t think of any skillful way out. In cases like that, you have to put up with the difficulty. You need to honor the principle of skillfulness more than your dislike of difficulty. That’s a form of restraint that’s hard but really important. One of the reasons … 
  20. Fear of Letting Go
     … So when you realize that you’re not to where the path can take you yet, but you’re on the way, have confidence in your skillful qualities, confidence in your skillful states of mind, because that’s what the Buddha’s asking you to do. We place our confidence in him, but what does that mean? That we place confidence in actually trying … 
  21. The Wounded Warrior
     … The solution to whatever problem there is in life starts primarily with looking at your own mind, admitting the fact you may have acted in unskillful ways in the past, but you can also train the mind to be more skillful now and on into the future. If you find that you’re not ready for the other ways of strengthening the mind, you … 
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